Three Months of the Ravishment Academy - Moment of Truth

[Claire]

In previous announcements, I said that I would evaluate whether the Ravishment Academy is worth running or not after three months. In light of the development of the forum over the last month, I'm very happy to say that I will not close the forum.

If you want to know more about what happened since the last announcement and where we currently stand, please read the second post!

[Claire]

During my two months announcement for the forum, I showed you a bunch of data that showed great progress for the forum, but also showed you two data points that revealed how the forum's overall activity was largely carried by @Shocker, @LaLia and myself. These two statistics were the number of daily posts on the forum and the average number of people commenting on a story not being Shocker, LaLia or me. I'm very happy to say that I can show you now how both numbers have changed for the better - drastically.



This graph shows you the evolution of the number of daily posts. During the two months announcement, we were in the middle of that late May/early June peak induced by @RapeU posting his stories. As predicted, the number of daily posts started to drop again once he was done, but not for long! The Gang Rape Galore contest induced an activity spike on the forum we had not seen before. Not only did we get 12 participants in that contest, but the stories also received a lot of attention and many great comments. If you haven't done so yet, I can only encourage you to scroll through those story threads and look at the comments. These are not just quick posts saying "I liked it!" or "I want more!" but comments that actually engage with the text. As someone who recently posted her own stories on Literotica and AO3, I can tell you how rare that kind of feedback from readers is. So look at this contest and I hope you will see a glimpse of what the future of the Academy can be if we keep growing as a community as we have so far. I think if we keep going like this that we can be the place where authors of erotica go to actually get a response and get more than the hollow satisfaction of a rising view count.

After the contest was over, the number of daily posts dropped again, but stayed high compared to what we had seen in May. And, this high level of activity was no longer dependent on Shocker, LaLia and me. My share in the number of posts on the forum had once been above 1/3, but is now getting closer to 20%. During the two months announcement, I told you that the average number of people posting on a story not being Shocker, LaLia or me was 1.4. Over the last month, this number has increased to 3.1, not just for the new stories since then but for the average over ALL stories. I hope to see this number rising further in the future. But combined with the overall increase in the number of daily posts, this is a clear sign of the forum depending a little less on the activity of just a few individuals.

The contest then also brought us our first popular story with @Shocker's contest winner Fugitives. I really hope that you will help us add a few more stories to the Popular Stories board soon. Especially if you have read and enjoyed but not rated a story, try revisiting it maybe. And I would like to make you aware that you can rate a story with up to 3 points and upgrade your rating whenever your impression of a story has improved! I hope that we will soon have a Popular Story of each length category to add some variety to the mix!

So what about some of the other numbers I showed you last time? Our findability via Google is still going great!



We are now close to getting 200 clicks (how often someone clicks on a search result for our forum) per day via Google alone. When I showed you this same graph a month ago, we had just breached the 100 clicks barrier.

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Impressions (how often our forum gets shown in search results) is now close to 400 and was arond 250 a month ago.



Daily visits have also continued their upwards trend. Last month, we sat at 650 visits per day, now we are at 975.

The only thing that has not continued to increase is the number of daily registrations.



After a brief detour to 6 registrations per day, we now seem to have stabilized between 4 and 5 new users per day. That is a good number still and I believe that it will rise again as we increase the number of stories in the Popular Stories board.


So yeah, the Academy will keep going. The number of people willing to participate in the our next tournament is large already and maybe we will get a few more people to sign up for Used and Abused? Anybody is welcome to throw their hat into the ring! And a big thank you to everyone who contributed to this great month of our little forum! <3

[Lucius]

The gloomier announcements of the past months elicited much greater activity. Good news is good news, there's not much to add -- other than to congratulate the RavishA founders, @Claire, @Vela Nanashi, @LaLia and @Shocker.

[Shocker]

The gloomier announcements of the past months elicited much greater activity. Good news is good news, there's not much to add -- other than to congratulate the RavishA founders, @Claire, @Vela Nanashi, @LaLia and @Shocker.

Founders are the ladies, I was only early in for the ride.

[Claire]

@Lucius I guess the old saying "Bad news travels fast" holds true for us, too. Nevertheless, I hope people are as happy to see the Academy continue as some of the posts on the previous announcements suggested.

[JTCK]

It’s really impressive what you’ve built in just 3 months! Thank you for that. And also a big thank you to the authors who have already posted so many stories.

[HistBuff]

It’s really impressive what you’ve built in just 3 months! Thank you for that. And also a big thank you to the authors who have already posted so many stories.

I second this! For me, the great positive turning point was when I learned that my user name was being googled by past RU guests and memebers and they found their way here. Claire even wrote my user name in the same sentence as @Vile8r . Wow!
I got so motivated that I decided to become actually (or reasonably) fluent in German.

Kudos to @Claire , @Vela Nanashi and @LaLia ! @Shocker being early for the ride also contributed

[Claire]

@HistBuff Let me tell you, since the launch of the forum (April 4), searches for "histbuff" generated 104 clicks for the forum on Google. Another 8 clicks were generated by searches for "histbuff stories". And this is how the "histbuff" clicks developed over time:



In the beginning, not much was happening because the forum was new. But then you see a clear spike starting May 16 and peaking from May 25 to May 30. Partially, this might related to you creating HistBuff Antique Shop of Mass Rapes on May 21. But if you deleted your AO3 account around that time, that might also explain that sudden increase in clicks because you might have sent your fans into a panicked frenzy. After that, the number of clicks per day calmed down a bit, but on average I'd say we're still looking at something like 2 clicks per day for "histbuff" just from Google.

You can add from Bing searches 4 more clicks for "histbuff porn stories" and 3 more for "ravishment university histbuff" since our launch. I can't tell you how often people find us for searches related to you via DuckDuckGo, but in general, people do find us something like 2 to 2.5 times as often via DuckDuckGo compared to Bing. If that holds true for you, too, then you can add another 15 clicks maybe from DuckDuckGo.

So in total, I think something like 130 to 150 clicks for histbuff related searches over the last 3 months (or 2 if you drop the first month of the forum before search engines started showing the forum for searches related to you) seems to be a realistic number. And of course, I can't tell you how many people were instead sent to Literotica, AO3 or some other place where you might have published your stories. But yes, you are not only a known figure in our community, your name is very searchable. If for example people would ever want to search for @Lucius' or my stories, we would have a hard time getting found with our user names. But HistBuff? That name is gold in terms of branding!

[Claire]

It’s really impressive what you’ve built in just 3 months! Thank you for that. And also a big thank you to the authors who have already posted so many stories.

Thank you! And I can only repeat that you for our authors. We started with 15 stories on day 1, now we have over 200! That's a great development.

[peterfrisk]

Let me just say that I’m happy to hear that the academy is going to remain open. Thank you Claire, Vela and all the other members for keeping this small part of internet open.